«Homo disciplinatus» as an object of the policy of social control (to the question of the simulacrumisation of the national policy of preventing torture in the 21st century)

Abstract

The problem presented in this article is related to the social phenomenon of torture, as well as the political prerequisites for the spread of this phenomenon in the 21st century.
In the 21st century, torture became a category not so much of legal as of political science, shaping an important part of the modern political discourse on the relationship between government and society. Torture, formally prohibited by universal and regional human rights standards and the national legislation of all modern states, has become an important tool of social control policy.
Despite the formal outlawing of torture, today torture exists precisely as a tool of social control policy and is widely used as a social practice. This informal policy has a negative connotation, which does not exclude its existence as an objective component of modern power relations even without formally declared subjects.
Torture did not disappear as a social phenomenon even in the second half of the 20th century, as it is claimed within the framework of the classical approach. Torture by agents of the state and representatives of political elites was and remains the sphere of special management.
Torture is currently widely used in power relations by various political actors based on the formula of the prohibition of torture – "absolute in principle but relative in application".
The invisibility of torture in the 21st century does not mean the absence of such social practices. Any political regime tries to control the population, where torture can be considered a kind of "by-product" of mechanisms of panoptic social control or as a kind of "excess of the lower-level performers" in the process of "securing society". At the same time, the higher echelons, on the contrary, actively declare the search for new, more effective, and modern formal methods of combating torture.
On the one hand, national criminal justice systems (including penitentiary systems) cannot cope with the formally declared tasks of dealing with deviants exclusively within the framework of formal procedures enshrined in national legislation against the background of an increase in classes, types, types and, as a result, the number of deviants.
On the other hand, the citizens themselves, in exchange for their "freedom", demand even greater "security", where the ways and methods of achieving the appropriate concentration of security are no longer important for them. The practical possibility of using torture on a "terrorist" to obtain information about further terrorist acts or on a "dangerous murderer" to obtain his confession opens a "Pandora’s box", where a wide and at the same time extremely dangerous prospect of using torture against all "dangerous" people considered as "others". Moreover, registries of "dangerous others" is in danger of being expanded.
A striking example of the extent to which the externally declared subject policy of the prevention of torture by nation states is intertwined with the policy of torture is the support of modern states for prison subcultures and informal hierarchies in their prison systems. The main thing here is the very declared opposition between the state power and the informal power, where the state, completely unashamed, signs a pact to provide it with "security guarantees" in a supposedly state penitentiary system in exchange for a "license to use torture" that is granted "informal leaders".
Therefore, the problematic of this paper can be formulated with the following question, which seems to be rhetorical: if in the end, even in the 13th century, Robin Hood was tamed by the Sheriff of Nottingham, then why in the 21st century the modern state cannot tame "informal leaders", giving them a large share of state power and giving private actors a "license" to torture?